Kabam, SweetLabs and Download.com are bringing social games to the desktop

Do you love playing social games but hate launching a browser and navigating to a particular website just to play them? Now Download.com, Kabam and SweetLabs are teaming up to take social games out of the browser and put them right on your desktop. The companies will be utilizing SweetLabs’ Pokki desktop app to create a new home for Kabam games like The Godfather: Five Families, Edgeworld, Thirst of Night and Dragons of Atlantis.

The most tantalizing aspect of the partnership is the promise to play the aforementioned games right on your desktop in fullscreen mode, eliminating the borders and general clutter of browsers and social networks. “We created Pokki to enable apps like Kabam’s games to shine on the desktop, one click away from running in full-screen, bridging the gap between web and desktop,” said Chester Ng, co-founder and CMO, SweetLabs. “Download.com represents a huge distribution channel that will let us reach millions of Windows users just waiting to breathe new life into their PC.”

With this move we can begin to answer an important question that may shape the future of social gaming – are the games more or less appealing when run on the desktop as opposed to in a browser or a social network such as Facebook? Do these games still hold their appeal when they’re no longer a simple distraction for when you’re bored at work and instead become an entity unto themselves? It seems we may get our answer soon enough.